Plague Year by Jeff Carlson

conventional, and she was not a prude. In her junior year she had been among the girls in the dormitory who stripped down to their underwear for most of spring semester after the air-conditioning blew out. Some years later, on an apartment balcony just three floors above the Miami traffic, she had given her stepbrother a hand job with SPF 45 coconut sunblock. More and more she had taken to contemplating the line of Ulinov’s shoulders and the breadth of his hands, the smooth, ruddy bump that was his lower lip.
    Amazing, that six people hurtling around a dying planet in a tiny metal shell could find new ways to torment themselves— but whether Deborah Reece with her blond hair and her neat little hips had acted out of boredom or a physician’s urge to heal, the truth was that Wallace had burrowed deeper into his grief as Mills became distracted and hostile. Poor Gus, always a churning supply of words, developed a stammer in Deb’s presence.
    “Wasting time, you, do you have an appointment?” he asked. “Let Ruth say what she has to.” Gustavo had folded himself into the corner like a crab, shying away from open room, and Ruth worried how he’d react back on Earth, exposed to miles of sky and land. It made her appreciate his support all the more—
    Deb snorted and kicked toward the exit. Mills, blocking her path, grabbed new handholds with a neat pull-and-push movement that carried him aside to clear her way yet also backed him farther from the group.
    “Stop.” It was risky, but Ruth had nothing left except a blunt assault. “You’ll be back,” she told them. “You’ll all be able to come back here again.”
    Mills looked directly at her for the first time, a mix of emotion cutting across his face.
    Ruth said, “I can beat this thing, I swear it, but I need to be on the ground.” Then she lost eye contact with Mills as Deb moved between them, and fought to keep from raising her voice. “We’ll have spaceflight again in no time! There was hardly any industrial damage, they’ll want the most experienced crews . . .”
    Deborah turned to stare and missed her handhold, but Mills caught her waist—and despite everything that had or hadn’t happened between the doctor and the pilot, neither reacted to each other’s touch. The ungodly echoing drone of the air circulators made their silence all the louder.
    Too far. Ruth had gone too far and she knew it, and she’d barely touched the surface of what she felt was the real problem—their pride, their vanity. She should have been flown down to join the other scientists in Leadville a month ago or even earlier, as soon as the snowpack could be cleared, yet Colorado had kept them in orbit for the same reasons that the astronauts wanted so badly to stay, prestige, power, a reasonable fear that the human race might be trapped in the mountains forever and only look at the moon and stars with fading memory.
    She also had no doubt that the crew was terrified of being without purpose. Couldn’t they see that they’d actually have more value on the ground? Engineers, pilots, radiomen, doctors, these were everything that would allow Ruth and her colleagues time to defeat the locust.
    Ulinov broke the quiet, thumping his big palm against a supply cabinet. “We are following orders to stay,” he said.
    Ruth shook her head. “There’s nothing more I can do here.”
    “What if you are wrong?”
    “I, but— What if you’re wrong?”
    “New data comes up every hour. Tomorrow they may find what you need, what only works in zero gee.” His frown wavered as he watched her face, but then he struck the cabinet again. “I decide,” he said. “I tell you no.”
    * * * *
    Seventeen days hadn’t been enough for Ruth. Since learning of the FBI’s new data pinpointing the locust’s birth, she’d ramped up her campaign to sway opinions in Leadville, making as much of a nuisance of herself as possible for someone in orbit. Unfortunately, at best she was 250 miles above